Carrying out beheadings and other extreme acts is unthinkable for
most people, but the right cocktail of factors can make anyone an
extremist, says neuroscientist Prof Ian Robertson.

As Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria butcher thousands of
“infidels” and carry off their women and children into slavery, many in
the West are inclined to see this as an unique outcrop of Islamic
fundamentalism. Yet after overrunning a Bosnian town on 11th July 1995,
Bosnian Serb – ostensibly Christian – forces, cold-bloodedly massacred
8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Hutu genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda,
Khmer Rouge mass-murder of Cambodian city-dwellers, Nazi genocide of
Jews, Gypsies and the disabled…. the list of savagery is as long as it
is profoundly depressing.

What, then are the origins of savagery, if they cannot be ascribed to a single religion or ideology?

1 - Savagery begets savagery

The first part of an answer may be horribly simple: savagery begets
savagery. Callousness, aggression and lack of empathy are common
responses by people who have been harshly treated themselves. In the
Nazi concentration camps, for instance, many of the cruellest guards
were themselves prisoners – the notorious “kapos”. Sexually abused
children – particularly males – are more likely to go on to become
sexual abusers themselves as adults, although the majority do not.
Victims, in other words, often respond to trauma by themselves becoming
victimisers.

2 - Submersion in the Group

But victim becoming victimiser is not the only explanation for
savagery. When the State breaks down, and with it law and order and
civic society, there is only one recourse for survival – the group.
Whether defined by religion, racial, political, tribal or clan – or for
that matter by the brute dominance of a gang-leader – survival depends
on the mutual security offered by the group.

War bonds people together in their groups and this bonding assuages
some of the terrific fear and distress the individual feels when the
state breaks down. It also offers self-esteem to people who feel
humiliated by their loss of place and status in a relatively ordered
society. To the extent that this happens, then individual and group
identities partially merge and the person’s actions become as much a
manifestation of the group as of the individual will. When this happens,
people can do terrible things they would never have imagined doing
otherwise: individual conscience has little place in an embattled,
warring group, because the individual and group selves are one so long
as the external threat continues. It is groups which are capable of
savagery, much more than any individual alone.

You can see it in the faces of the young male Islamic State
militants as they race by on their trucks, black flags waving, broad
smiles on their faces, clenched fists aloft, fresh from the slaughter of
infidels who would not convert to Islam. What you can see is a
biochemical high from a combination of the bonding hormone oxytocin and
the dominance hormone testosterone. Much more than cocaine or alcohol,
these natural drugs lift mood, induce optimism and energise aggressive
action on the part of the group. And because the individual identity has
been submerged largely into the group identity, the individual will be
much more willing to sacrifice himself in battle – or suicide bombing,
for that matter. Why? – Because if I am submerged in the group, I live
on in the group even if the individual “me”, dies.

When people bond together, oxytocin levels rise in their blood, but
a consequence of this is a greater tendency to demonise and de-humanise
the out-group. That is the paradox of selfless giving to your in-group –
it makes it easier for you to anaesthetise your empathy for the
out-group and to see them as objects. And doing terrible things to
objects is fine because they are not human.

3 - The out-group as objects

But here is one daunting fact as we contemplate the Sunni-Shia
carnage in Iraq and Syria: in-group tribalism is strengthened – and
loathing for the out-group correspondingly increased – where religion
defines the groups. Even when aggression against the other group is
self-destructive – as we can see so tragically across the Middle East –
religiously-based groups advocated a degree of aggression against their
opponents which was absent in non-religiously defined groups.

4 - Revenge

Revenge, which is a strong value in Arab culture, may play a part
in perpetuating the savagery. Of course vengeful retaliation for
savagery begets more savagery in a never-ending cycle. But more, while
revenge is a powerful motivator, it is also a deceiver, because the
evidence is that taking revenge on someone, far from quelling the
distress and anger which drives it, actually perpetuates and magnifies
it.

5 - Leaders

Finally, people will do savage things if their leaders tell them it
is acceptable to do so, particularly if they have given their selves to
the group self. The Rwandan genocide was switched on by a series of
radio broadcasts by a small group of leaders to a population who, by
that instruction, were turned into savage murderers of former friends
and neighbours who were in the out-group. The soldiers of the Soviet
army committed mass rape as they invaded Germany in 1945 because senior
commanders had advocated it. Islamic State fighters are slaughtering
unarmed Christians and Yazidis because their leaders have told them that
this is the right thing to do.

Leaders at many levels from the tribe to the country, are
responsible for this savagery, and so leaders can eventually stop it –
just as they chose to do in Rwanda, after international pressure. But
the trouble is, as we have seen, when leaders choose to encourage
savagery, not quell it, there is nothing hard-wired into human beings to
stand up against it.